The problem with your argument is that the "new study" you base your hopeful thoughts on is bunk. Scott Alexander has a deep study on it in Astral Codex Ten, with the summary conclusion "it’s basically a typical null-result-having study. The authors should not have reported their result as positive, and the media should have challenged their decision to do so rather than uncritically signal-boosting it." In other words, wouldn't it be pretty to imagine that CTC would help baby cognitive development . . . but it does not, so pretending it does is not really helpful.
I read the ACT article and adjusted the first sentence (which already included a "may") to link to it. Still, the study isn't key here -- it's a news peg that I used to launch into a riff about babies being helpless that ended with a moose doing close-up magic.
You should have your mom back on to lecture more about heavy metal and how the initial riffs form key impressions and expectations for the entire song that follows.
Well, okay, but if the study is not the "key" it as least is the lead peg on which you hang the essay. And I would be happy if CTC did help babies and young children be warm, dressed, fed, and safe--whether or not it improved their cognitive ability. The problem then becomes, you still got the same parents/caretakers, just with more money. It seems unlikely, based on human nature as it actually exists, that much of the extra money would actually wind up for the children's benefits rather than the parents' pleasures. Again, it is pretty to imagine more caring parents, but just more money does not, I regret, have a direct link to that.
There are, certainly, a few parents out there who will take the money straight to the dog track, and fuck them, I'm not totally sure what to do about that (though there are thoughts in this area -- food stamp-type stuff). But you have to concede that there are also many poor parents who would spend it on their kids, plus a lot of lower-middle-class working families for whom a bit of extra money would provide a welcome buffer (make it so that if the water heater breaks, they don't turn to the kid and say "sorry, no summer camp this year" -- that type of thing).
And food stamps have their own problems. The number of times I've seen people buying and selling food stamps to get a portion of their cash value has been insane.
Public schools are one way to ensure access of certain benefits direct to children (and is used this way for many programs), but that system is already a dumpster fire adding even more ways for it to go beyond its remit doesn't seem useful.
But yeah, some people are just bad people, and other people have enough problems that even if they aren't bad it has a similar effect. But just because some people might do something terrible doesn't mean we shouldn't do it / allow it for everyone else. Maybe instead of talking about how some families might spend the money on Pokemon cards we can talk about how that's such a small percentage and for 98% of the neediest they are going to be correctly using it to buy Magic cards.
If there are better ways to help child development, I'm all ears. The CTC does seem like a quite good way. "Directly providing nutrition" sounds to me like food stamps, which I also support, and I think that the flexibility of CTC money is a feature, not a bug. FWIW, I'm 100% on board with your thoughts about not taxing wages below a certain threshold; I've never liked the payroll tax, but it's a relic we're stuck with, and the politics of changing it are tough because people think that if we get rid of it, we'd also be getting rid of Social Security. That isn't really true, of course, but it's what people think.
And there can be other reasons to support the CTC instead of child development, or even child/family wellfare. There's the old saying that goes like you get less of what you tax and more of what you subsidize. Everyone complains about population inversions, and reproduction collapse, and all those things that I'm not entirely sure are things that are that big of a deal but certainly mess with a lot of our current institutions. The CTC is essentially a subsidy for having kids.
So hopefully people will have more kids.
Now sure, you'll get some people that point on the margin and say "X had kids just for the money" and that might even be true even if that's a bad strategy. And you might get some people who have a kid more than they would have had normally and get crushed by all the soul-sucking work that having a kid entails sometimes. But that's how margins work.
You're also going to get people who have kids a few years earlier than they would have and avoid having to spend Way Too Much on infertility treatments, or while they are still young enough to enjoy playing horsey outside of adult-themed parties, or maybe just have one more kid than they were planning and realize that it turns out going from 0-1 kids is a lot harder than going from nearly other +1 increment.
If only there was a federal department whose job it was AFTER these policies were implemented to see what their actual effect was.
My argument isn't "based on" that study; there are many reasons why aid to families with kids might be good even if that particular study doesn't tell us anything.
Well, the humor might have to wait for another time -- writing jokes is hard and takes time! I spent 20 minutes last night muttering "dildo made of gingerbread...dildo made of saltines...dildo made of Jell-O...(etc.)." Also, I don't have a graphics guy -- I'm making these graphics myself using the three credits in Photoshop that I have from the Evergreen State College.
But, basically, I see transfer payments -- in whatever form you want to put them in (Social Security, the CTC, the EITC) -- as insurance. None of us know exactly where we'll end up on the income spectrum, and many of us will occupy different points at different times (I have -- I worked at Wendy's, I worked construction, I was a temp, but I also got a fancy Hollywood job once). With this being the case, I think it makes sense to create an "insurance" system so that if you're at the low end of the spectrum, things aren't so bad. I see no real need to try to equilibrate the wage scale -- you'll almost never hear me talk about "income inequality", because absolutes are far more important than relative wealth. You'll also only rarely hear me stump for "front-end" economic measures because I think that market distortions are a serious problem, I think they frequently abrogate agreements between consenting adults, so I generally think that "back end" stuff works better. Beyond the moral case, there's a lot of evidence suggesting that a solid consumer spending base is one of the secrets to the American economy's success, and that propping that up is a hedge against some bad things like deflationary spirals. Plus, some of this spending is investment in a very real way -- if a parent spends on a kid in a way that helps that kid become a healthy, productive member of society, that's a win for everyone, and if a person spends money on themselves in a way that boosts their prospects (e.g. education, capital investment), that's also a win.
Long story short: We're rich enough to be able to afford an "insurance" system in which anyone who's making a reasonable effort can earn a ticket to a decent, middle-class life. We can design that system so that the incentive arrows always point in the direction of work. We can use this "insurance" to help mitigate the business cycle. And we can make it so that pretty much every kid -- basically every kid except the extremely unlucky few whose parents are egregious pieces of shit (and I feel like those kids are likely to end up in foster care anyway) -- has the essential things they need. If we were living in...I don't know...Somalia, I might feel differently, I might say "unfortunately, the money just isn't in the budget". But we're blessed to be very rich, we have the money, so in this case, a transfer that boosts middle-class and lower-middle-class families seems like money well spent.
Came here to post this, saw someone else doing the lord's work. Thank you. There are already so may good reasons one might have for this program, wasting any more breath/ink on bad reasons doesn't help (and encourages the well-intentioned people to continue to fudge well-intentioned results into lies).
Well done! Clear enough to be enjoyable and persuasive, but not so clear that people will immediately recognize that it's basically an argument for UBI.
Terrific article! One quick clarification: it is true that Swiss voters recently rejected a UBI, but they already have a robust social safety net, including a child tax credit. This credit comes automatically to everyone who lives here and has a child living here, including foreigners (like our family). The tax credit isn’t means-tested either. Until our daughter returned to the US for college, we got cash back for her from the Swiss government every year. It makes sense: families will just put that cash back into the economy. Child tax credits like this are considered totally normal and uncontroversial here—and as a good way to encourage people to have kids by removing a bit of the financial burden. Given that Switzerland is much richer than the US, the child tax credit doesn’t appear to have held them back.
Glad you liked the article! And interesting to get the perspective from Switzerland, which I think perhaps supports one of my main points: Cash aid is likely to work better (or, phrased another way: "be popular") if it's basically a supplement to income, not a replacement for income. The proposal was SO generous ($2,525 a month!), even by European standards, that I'm not surprised that it failed.
Excellent piece. I just may have to become a subscriber!
The problem with your argument is that the "new study" you base your hopeful thoughts on is bunk. Scott Alexander has a deep study on it in Astral Codex Ten, with the summary conclusion "it’s basically a typical null-result-having study. The authors should not have reported their result as positive, and the media should have challenged their decision to do so rather than uncritically signal-boosting it." In other words, wouldn't it be pretty to imagine that CTC would help baby cognitive development . . . but it does not, so pretending it does is not really helpful.
I read the ACT article and adjusted the first sentence (which already included a "may") to link to it. Still, the study isn't key here -- it's a news peg that I used to launch into a riff about babies being helpless that ended with a moose doing close-up magic.
Don't undersell this, I love close-up magic and had no idea moose came to it so early. Just really impressive
You should have your mom back on to lecture more about heavy metal and how the initial riffs form key impressions and expectations for the entire song that follows.
Well, okay, but if the study is not the "key" it as least is the lead peg on which you hang the essay. And I would be happy if CTC did help babies and young children be warm, dressed, fed, and safe--whether or not it improved their cognitive ability. The problem then becomes, you still got the same parents/caretakers, just with more money. It seems unlikely, based on human nature as it actually exists, that much of the extra money would actually wind up for the children's benefits rather than the parents' pleasures. Again, it is pretty to imagine more caring parents, but just more money does not, I regret, have a direct link to that.
There are, certainly, a few parents out there who will take the money straight to the dog track, and fuck them, I'm not totally sure what to do about that (though there are thoughts in this area -- food stamp-type stuff). But you have to concede that there are also many poor parents who would spend it on their kids, plus a lot of lower-middle-class working families for whom a bit of extra money would provide a welcome buffer (make it so that if the water heater breaks, they don't turn to the kid and say "sorry, no summer camp this year" -- that type of thing).
And food stamps have their own problems. The number of times I've seen people buying and selling food stamps to get a portion of their cash value has been insane.
Public schools are one way to ensure access of certain benefits direct to children (and is used this way for many programs), but that system is already a dumpster fire adding even more ways for it to go beyond its remit doesn't seem useful.
But yeah, some people are just bad people, and other people have enough problems that even if they aren't bad it has a similar effect. But just because some people might do something terrible doesn't mean we shouldn't do it / allow it for everyone else. Maybe instead of talking about how some families might spend the money on Pokemon cards we can talk about how that's such a small percentage and for 98% of the neediest they are going to be correctly using it to buy Magic cards.
If there are better ways to help child development, I'm all ears. The CTC does seem like a quite good way. "Directly providing nutrition" sounds to me like food stamps, which I also support, and I think that the flexibility of CTC money is a feature, not a bug. FWIW, I'm 100% on board with your thoughts about not taxing wages below a certain threshold; I've never liked the payroll tax, but it's a relic we're stuck with, and the politics of changing it are tough because people think that if we get rid of it, we'd also be getting rid of Social Security. That isn't really true, of course, but it's what people think.
And there can be other reasons to support the CTC instead of child development, or even child/family wellfare. There's the old saying that goes like you get less of what you tax and more of what you subsidize. Everyone complains about population inversions, and reproduction collapse, and all those things that I'm not entirely sure are things that are that big of a deal but certainly mess with a lot of our current institutions. The CTC is essentially a subsidy for having kids.
So hopefully people will have more kids.
Now sure, you'll get some people that point on the margin and say "X had kids just for the money" and that might even be true even if that's a bad strategy. And you might get some people who have a kid more than they would have had normally and get crushed by all the soul-sucking work that having a kid entails sometimes. But that's how margins work.
You're also going to get people who have kids a few years earlier than they would have and avoid having to spend Way Too Much on infertility treatments, or while they are still young enough to enjoy playing horsey outside of adult-themed parties, or maybe just have one more kid than they were planning and realize that it turns out going from 0-1 kids is a lot harder than going from nearly other +1 increment.
If only there was a federal department whose job it was AFTER these policies were implemented to see what their actual effect was.
My argument isn't "based on" that study; there are many reasons why aid to families with kids might be good even if that particular study doesn't tell us anything.
Well, the humor might have to wait for another time -- writing jokes is hard and takes time! I spent 20 minutes last night muttering "dildo made of gingerbread...dildo made of saltines...dildo made of Jell-O...(etc.)." Also, I don't have a graphics guy -- I'm making these graphics myself using the three credits in Photoshop that I have from the Evergreen State College.
But, basically, I see transfer payments -- in whatever form you want to put them in (Social Security, the CTC, the EITC) -- as insurance. None of us know exactly where we'll end up on the income spectrum, and many of us will occupy different points at different times (I have -- I worked at Wendy's, I worked construction, I was a temp, but I also got a fancy Hollywood job once). With this being the case, I think it makes sense to create an "insurance" system so that if you're at the low end of the spectrum, things aren't so bad. I see no real need to try to equilibrate the wage scale -- you'll almost never hear me talk about "income inequality", because absolutes are far more important than relative wealth. You'll also only rarely hear me stump for "front-end" economic measures because I think that market distortions are a serious problem, I think they frequently abrogate agreements between consenting adults, so I generally think that "back end" stuff works better. Beyond the moral case, there's a lot of evidence suggesting that a solid consumer spending base is one of the secrets to the American economy's success, and that propping that up is a hedge against some bad things like deflationary spirals. Plus, some of this spending is investment in a very real way -- if a parent spends on a kid in a way that helps that kid become a healthy, productive member of society, that's a win for everyone, and if a person spends money on themselves in a way that boosts their prospects (e.g. education, capital investment), that's also a win.
Long story short: We're rich enough to be able to afford an "insurance" system in which anyone who's making a reasonable effort can earn a ticket to a decent, middle-class life. We can design that system so that the incentive arrows always point in the direction of work. We can use this "insurance" to help mitigate the business cycle. And we can make it so that pretty much every kid -- basically every kid except the extremely unlucky few whose parents are egregious pieces of shit (and I feel like those kids are likely to end up in foster care anyway) -- has the essential things they need. If we were living in...I don't know...Somalia, I might feel differently, I might say "unfortunately, the money just isn't in the budget". But we're blessed to be very rich, we have the money, so in this case, a transfer that boosts middle-class and lower-middle-class families seems like money well spent.
Came here to post this, saw someone else doing the lord's work. Thank you. There are already so may good reasons one might have for this program, wasting any more breath/ink on bad reasons doesn't help (and encourages the well-intentioned people to continue to fudge well-intentioned results into lies).
Well done! Clear enough to be enjoyable and persuasive, but not so clear that people will immediately recognize that it's basically an argument for UBI.
Terrific article! One quick clarification: it is true that Swiss voters recently rejected a UBI, but they already have a robust social safety net, including a child tax credit. This credit comes automatically to everyone who lives here and has a child living here, including foreigners (like our family). The tax credit isn’t means-tested either. Until our daughter returned to the US for college, we got cash back for her from the Swiss government every year. It makes sense: families will just put that cash back into the economy. Child tax credits like this are considered totally normal and uncontroversial here—and as a good way to encourage people to have kids by removing a bit of the financial burden. Given that Switzerland is much richer than the US, the child tax credit doesn’t appear to have held them back.
Glad you liked the article! And interesting to get the perspective from Switzerland, which I think perhaps supports one of my main points: Cash aid is likely to work better (or, phrased another way: "be popular") if it's basically a supplement to income, not a replacement for income. The proposal was SO generous ($2,525 a month!), even by European standards, that I'm not surprised that it failed.